Political Quotes

“I thank my friend from Pennsylvania and would observe that he has exercised excellent leadership on this issue. It is a very important issue. It is not at the top of the news media's treatment, but it is an important issue, and it is one that we are close to being able to resolve in a bipartisan way. I also want to thank my colleague from Alaska, who has been a champion for this issue. I would make a couple of points to underscore what my friends have just said. We are talking about ballast water in the waters of the United States. Some of it gets out; they let some ballast water in, and they have to let some out. It is incidental to operating a boat in the waters of the United States of America. We want this water to be clean. We want it to be as environmentally pure as possible. That is what this bill attempts to do and attempts to do on a uniform basis, rather than having a patchwork of regulations from State to State and area to area. It would give us one strict national standard regarding the incidental discharge of this ballast water. The water that gets into our lakes and rivers needs to be safe for the environment, needs to be safe for fish in our American waters, and needs to be safe for marine plant life. What this bill would do is have the EPA involved in writing the regulations and determining what is safe for American waters. So EPA would be the scientific part, and the Coast Guard would be a part of the enforcement.…”